The horror of what happened to Rhiannon Whyte is hard to contemplate. The young mother, who was 27, was viciously — and fatally — attacked at a railway station in Walsall by a Sudanese asylum seeker who lived at the migrant hotel where she worked. Yesterday Deng Majek, who stabbed Whyte 23 times with a screwdriver in October last year, was found guilty of her murder.

In a revealing twist, Majek’s sentencing has had to be postponed because his real age is not known. He claims to be 19 but an identity document issued in Germany, where he was refused asylum, recorded his age as 27. It’s confirmation of one of the most troubling aspects of the chaotic asylum system in this country, which is that the UK authorities know almost nothing about men who arrive illegally in small boats.

Many of them, like Majek, come from countries convulsed by war. When the British state puts them in hotels for months or even years, it has no idea whether they are genuine victims of conflict, traumatized witnesses who desperately need support, or serious criminals capable of rape and murder. There is no filtering process, and the asylum system takes so long to assess claims that it has no idea whether they pose a threat to women and girls.

Women’s safety is such a low priority that an asylum seeker from Ethiopia, convicted last month of sexual assaults on a woman and a 14-year-girl in Essex, has been mistakenly released from prison. Hadush Kebatu, whose arrest prompted protests outside the Bell Hotel in Epping, was sentenced last month to a year in prison. He was also made the subject of a five-year sexual harm prevention order. In a scarcely credible development, it emerged last night that he was apparently released “in error” from HMP Chelmsford on Friday when he should have been moved to an immigration detention center.

Earlier this week, an asylum seeker from Syria appeared for sentencing after being convicted in August of assaults on three different women in Horley. Qais Al-Aswad, 26, lived in a Surrey hotel when he sexually assaulted the women as he cycled past them in May and June. His behavior demonstrates a pattern of offending, with multiple victims, yet he wasn’t even sent to prison. He was given a six-month sentence, suspended for two years. Does anyone seriously think that protects women and girls?

Of course it’s true that plenty of British men attack women, and the criminal justice system has an abysmal record of dealing with them. This fact is used to label critics of the UK asylum system as racist, which is missing the point on a grand scale. Many things happen in this country that affect men and women differently, and there are few areas where that’s more true than the impact of sexual violence.

Official statistics show that more than four times as many women as men experience sexual assault in England and Wales each year (3.4% versus 0.8%). It means that women and girls, regardless of ethnicity or religion, have more reason to worry about any developments that add to existing risk. And it’s hard to see the presence of large numbers of unaccompanied young men, whose backgrounds and possible criminal history are entirely unknown, as a negligible risk.

Many women who condemn violent protests outside hotels are troubled by the failure of the authorities to do the most basic inquiries into men who claim asylum in the UK. It’s about time the state recognized that some issues look very different from the point of view of vulnerable women and girls.

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Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.

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